


defining his parameters

by Visardist



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Non-Graphic Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-10
Updated: 2014-06-10
Packaged: 2018-02-04 03:54:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1764597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Visardist/pseuds/Visardist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky pieces things together, by himself. (And a cat, maybe.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	defining his parameters

**Author's Note:**

> Written anonymously in the ask box of buckytakethewheel on tumblr, only collected because one ask refused to go through. Currently I have no plans to continue this, so if you dislike cliffhangers, you should probably backbutton.

The dreams are vague and confused. There are, sometimes, laughter and claps on the back, or the whirl of arms around a girl, and music that he never hears anymore. There are, sometimes, the adrenaline surge, the sounds of fighting and of bullets around him, the taste of whiskey, bawdy English songs that he could half-sing if he heard the tunes awake.

He can always tell these dreams apart from the other ones, because in these dreams, the grind in his shoulder is not there.

He writes everything down, every snatch of memory. He was never trained for hacking, never anything but death and retrieval (occasionally both). But he has the thread now, and he runs with it. Away, far away, and he works around the lack of knowledge. He works by observation. He writes lyrics down. He figures out how to pick out tunes, though he can’t ever spend long in one music store or another.

\--

The first sign he has that his safehouse is breached is the meowing. He follows it, carefully, suspicious, and finds that the creaky floorboard conceals a hole. Literally a hole to outside, judging by the breeze, no wider than his fist, but still there is meowing.

He feeds a small wired camera in, bit by bit, and does not jump when his camera seems almost swallowed. 

He hauls steadily, ever more suspicious, and ready to destroy whatever comes up. Only, when it comes out, he finds he has fished out a cat. It’s not very big, only just out of kittenhood. Barely big enough to become stuck in the hole.

He’s not really sure what to do with it, so he gets its teeth apart to retrieve the camera, and pushes a chair over the creaky floorboard. There are worse things that could come through it.

\--

The cat follows him around the next few days. He deposits it outside when he’s satisfied both ends of the hole are sealed. Yet it waits outside his door when he leaves, dogs his footsteps until he’s on the street. When he returns it tries to enter behind him. Even coming back through the window it waits for him.

He takes it to a vet, eventually, ostensibly to verify that it is not a robot spy. He comes back with it, much cleaner, and clutching a detail of diet and cleaning routine and more.

He follows all the vet’s instructions, in the coming days. It is the closest thing he has to a mission now, and while the structure and even the focus is quite different, he clutches it like a lifeline.

He defines the parameters of his mission thus:

  1. Uncover information on James Buchanan Barnes (he has yet to identify himself with him).
  2. Compile every memory on paper to aid primary mission.
  3. Take care of cat.



\--

The safehouse is in a neighborhood where no one remembers anyone else. It is no place for children or family, for children are the most suspicious and the sharpest-eyed. This is likely a good thing, because Cat is very memorable. It does not sharpen its claws on his left arm anymore after the first time, but unless he maneuvers properly, it will climb up his jacket and stay, swaying, on his shoulder. It is a little dance every time he exits his door or window.

He visits the Smithsonian often, not only to look at the man who shares his face, but also at the footage of the other men, to compare it to his dreams, his flashes of memory. The words he remembers hearing aren’t there, but the voices, those are the same. The dry wit of Jim Morita. The raucous laughter of Dugan and Jones. Even (though he cannot often bear to look at the main focus of the exhibit) the captain in his blue and white, marching onto the battlefield. He visits often.

Too often.

He goes one afternoon, and the captain is there. Not in blue and white, but white and brown, so people don’t look as closely, but still him. Someone has noticed. Someone has guessed, or realised, and warned. So instead of going inside, and comparing the fleeting image of mingled rejection-disappointment-amusement with Margaret Carter’s interview, he turns around and goes back to feed Cat.

It is not until later, letting Cat groom his unruly hair, that he thinks that he has missed an opportunity.

\--

It is time to move away. He has seen the flying man on the corner, looking around casually, and the captain buying a coffee in the small cafe as if he does it everyday. He guesses that they have tracked him back, so he abandons the safehouse.

There is information that he does not care to destroy; they can have that. There are caches that are useful; he sorts them out and destroys what he cannot fit into the cheaply-bought car. There is Cat; it has not left his shoulder since he began packing.

He leaves before dawn. He has only the vaguest idea of where to go except ‘away’, which is hardly advisable for a spy (former? current? this identity stays nebulous), but it is all he has.

North and east, he drives, with Cat roaming about in the car, and it’s only when he stops to feed Cat and himself (take care of assets, always take care of assets) ( _eat when you can, you don’t know where your next meal will come from_ ) that he looks up and realises he’s in New York State.

It seems a natural choice for him to go to NYC proper. He even drives in that direction for a time. But instead of turning on the exit, he goes on to Albany.

He does not know why.

Cat complains at his choice, in its inimitable clawed manner. He keeps shifting it to his right shoulder, so that the metal of his arm does not show through the holes it claws. Still it twines back round to his left, under his chin or the back of the seat.

\--

It is easy to track the captain from afar. People tweet or instagram their encounters with him all the time. (The words trip over even his mind’s tongue, unused as he is to their context, but he manages.) So he eases, bit by bit, as distance grows between them, and muscles relax in places he didn’t even know he had.

(There are yet others to worry about, the captain’s allies, but he covers his tracks, only uses the cash he steals, trusts to his mind and his body to safeguard himself.)

(And Cat.)

\--

When he reaches Albany, the safehouse is already occupied. It is the first misstep he has made, and only the semi-comical surprise of former allies (simply members of the same organisation, to put it most mildly) keeps him alive. He nearly loses a hand over it (fortunately the metal one) and in a few heartbeats he really does lose Cat. He comforts himself with the thought that it wasn’t visibly injured the last time he saw it, and finds himself a motel room to patch himself up.

It isn’t safe to stick around the neighbourhood, certainly isn’t rational, now that there is a last known location that can be appended to him again. Indeed it’s erring on the side of stupidity. SHIELD is broken, but Hydra will never be. He has killed one head; the two left will surely have sent for backup.

He has had to lose the car and its caches, but the guns strapped to his chest and back and thigh remain familiar weights.

How does one retrieve a stray animal, once and former, especially when he has never addressed it out loud? He has no idea. He roams the alleys, looking and looking and not daring to call out. In this he neglects all but his surroundings, senses heightened for the least sign of danger, of Hydra.

In this he is growing sloppy. The confusion and surreality of his dreams are no help. Perhaps it is fortunate that he is not the only one keeping and eye out for (on) Hydra safehouses.

\--

There is an itch at the back of his neck, the kind that comes with someone watching him. He thinks humourlessly that this is what his legacy comes to, hunting for a lost pet among trashcans, with a sniper on his six. Well, no matter.

He turns and looks, directly, upward to where someone might get a good sight on him. There, that movement just out of sight, ducking down behind the parapet. He bares his teeth. So they won’t take the shot they have? Fine.

He’ll go to them.

He gets to where the sniper was, easily. He has no need for stairs, nor secrecy when his target already knows him. The places where his metal fingers dig into the facade will puzzle, after, but it is no matter to him. As for outpacing them, that is just as easily done. He has his hand clamped around the back of the sniper’s neck almost before the other man realises he’s been caught.

On the other hand, that means he’s close enough to stab, which apparently is a mutual close-range sniper reflex.

 They stab at nearly the same time. But the sniper holds his knife in his left hand, which is unexpected, so as he buries his knife in the sniper’s side, the other man stabs into his forearm.

He snarls, mingled pain and frustration, and they fall back simultaneously. The sniper’s fingers smooth swiftly about his wound, unwilling to remove what is keeping him from bleeding out, but he himself has no such qualms. He barely feels the pain as he pulls the knife out of his flesh arm. The feeling is buried by the old automation, the singular objective that must be fulfilled. (If you asked at that moment what the objective  _was_ , well, you wouldn’t get an answer. The objective simply was.)

Blood runs down his arm, but he flexes his fingers, making sure he can still make a fist. His metal arm has always been stronger, but right now it has a surer grip.

During this, he looks up to find the sniper the same distance from him as before, but their relative positions have moved. The sniper has used the instinctive, unconscious motions of putting distance between them against him, moving forward for every step he takes back, backing him up to the edge.

He feels more than sees the street below, and the empty space at his back. His heel meets with the parapet, and he’s suddenly stock still. Self-preservation almost doesn’t let him hear the sniper, whose voice has been brought low in an effort to soothe.

"It’s okay. It’s okay. Put the knife down and c’mere. You have to have that seen to. We’re on your side, y’know? S’okay." The sniper doesn’t raise his hands, though, so he remains distrustful. He knows that the other man is carrying one gun over his chest, and another inside his thigh.

Definitely reaching for one of those.

So, instead of waiting, instead of watching, he turns round, and, well, falls more than jumps. At least it’s by choice. As he goes over the edge he feels the shot, a pinprick rather than the destruction he’s seen and felt, and it doesn’t make sense. But waves of weariness wash over him, and he’s out, absolutely limp, before strong arms catch him and he is borne back up to the roof.

 --

(“What the fuck, man, what was that?!”

"Why are you yelling at me, I’ve got a knife in my side!"

"The knife in your side ain’t got nothing to do with us almost having to explain to Steve why his not-so-dead buddy near went splat! Again!"

"Excuse me, who’s the one in need of medical attention here?"

“ _Both_ of you.”

"…Yeah, that’s fair."

A long pause as they leave the roof, then Clint says tentatively: “Can we maybe not tell Nat about this?”

"She’ll find out. Better hear it from you ‘steada Steve.")

\--

When he wakes again, he doesn’t panic. (A learned response: be still when woken, whether from sleep or the bone-deep cold.) He reads all the signals that his body sends him and he  _does. not. **panic**_ because the weight at his left shoulder is gone.

It is not heavier, as it was when he first received it, and it is not simply lighter, as they improved and upgraded it over decades. It is gone, gone, gone.

He is strapped down, over his chest, over his remaining arm, over his thighs, over his calves. He only risks opening his eyes when he is sure the rest of him is whole. The specific instruments around him are unfamiliar, but he knows where he is. A hospital. What is more, judging by the window nearby, somewhere not secure. Any intelligence agency worth its salt would not keep potential hostiles near so easy an escape.

This is unexpected. Well, the restraints aren’t unexpected, but that’s all.


End file.
